News Reports & Source Links

Published 21 December 2016. A first-person disciple's recollection: the author recalls "in Beijing, in the 1960s there were Cui Yufen, Yu Fengxian, Sun Mianjian, Zhang Guiyun and myself, all of whom studied under Master Chen," and records that after the Cultural Revolution, once the technical school of the First Service Bureau reopened, Chen Songru trained a new generation of disciples including Yu Jianmin, Liu Zihua, Zheng Shaowu, Yao Yufu and Hou Xinglin — a roster of disciples matching evidence already confirmed on this site. The piece calls Chen Songru the kitchen's first head chef, aligning with the direction of an unresolved dispute discussed at length in this site's two-part "Beijing Garden, Pearl of Sichuan Cuisine" essays, where a reader's objection was noted as still under investigation; this is another primary source supporting that same claim, without changing the existing open question.

Excerpted from China Cuisine, September 2017 issue. The author cites Chen Tinglong's account: in the 1950s, Chen Songru brought "sea cucumber with fermented bean paste" from Chengdu to the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant, and, finding the soybean-sprout bed beneath it too plain, replaced it with minced meat and cut the sea cucumber into long strips, renaming the dish "home-style minced pork sea cucumber" — which became a signature dish of the Sichuan Restaurant and a fixture at Great Hall of the People state banquets. The same piece cites disciple Luo Yuanyi's testimony that his greatest contribution to Sichuan cuisine "was measured innovation that brought out Sichuan flavor, while staying at the front line and teaching by example."

A long essay on the Sichuan masters brought to Beijing — Wu Yusheng, Luo Guorong, Chen Songru and others — of which the section “Chen Songru, Head of the Sichuan School” is the fullest. It records that in 1933, aged twelve, he entered the Taoletian restaurant in Chengdu, and that overwork and untreated illness left him permanently lame in one leg; Zhou Enlai’s charge at the trial dinner of 4 August 1959 that “Sichuan cooking must not be allowed to drift,” and Zhu De’s “if anyone objects, send him to me”; how, with senior chefs from every corner of Sichuan crowded into the new kitchen, he never took the side of any faction but held them together on the work itself; and Deng Xiaoping’s words at the 1982 birthday banquet for Sihanouk, “the taste of home is too good.” The piece is marked at its end as reprinted from “360doc,” so it is not an original source; within the same text the Sihanouk banquet is elsewhere dated 1983, and Choe Yong-gon’s visit 1963 (this site records 1962). Both readings are set down as they stand.

Traces the Yu Mansion architecture and the three courtyards of the Sichuan Restaurant, with a floor plan and a 1992 Beijing Daily photograph by Lü Jian of Chen Songru teaching young cooks. It resolves a long-standing doubt on this site: it records that George H. W. Bush became the second head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing in 1974, serving thirteen months, and that the office frequently held banquets at the restaurant — this site had flagged related claims as doubtful because Bush never served as Secretary of State. It also quotes Wang Lang’s essay “Farewell, Sichuan Restaurant”. A backup copy is kept at the original WeChat account "Old Beijing Through Old Photos" article: with only one host kept as backup, the trail breaks the day that host takes it down.

A long local-press profile covering the scale of the initial selection of cooks (more than a hundred senior chefs from Chongqing, Chengdu, Zigong, Nanchong, Yibin, Xinjin and Luzhou), the guests seated at the trial dinner of 4 August 1959, and one detail recorded nowhere else on this site: a childhood illness left untreated for lack of money that left him permanently lame. Several points contradict evidence held here: it dates 160 Kinds of Authentic Sichuan Cooking to a 2002 Jindun edition (the physical CIP record reads December 1991), gives his age at death as 72 (counted in the traditional Chinese way, matching the 1993 obituary — not an error; this site gives 71 in full years), and says six disciples went to Singapore (this site, following his own memoir, records eight — six from the Sichuan Restaurant and two from the Xiangshan Hotel).

Published 14 January 2017, focused on Chen Songru's lineage of sea-cucumber dishes. Records that in 1963 Zhou Enlai served "home-style sea cucumber" to a visiting Choe Yong-gon, Chairman of the DPRK Supreme People's Assembly Standing Committee, who praised the dish and said he would send people to learn it (this site records that visit as 1962; both accounts are presented alongside each other, unresolved). Also records Deng Xiaoping's 1982 birthday banquet for Prince Sihanouk at the Sichuan Restaurant, matching this site's default year. The piece closes with over forty sea-cucumber dish names; it also promotes a wholesale sea-cucumber business, so it is a commercial piece, and its historical claims are for reference only.

A first-person account by Chen Songru’s disciple Liu Zihua: in 1959, when Zhou Enlai inspected the restaurant during its founding, he specifically instructed that the “Er Bei Dining Hall” be kept open so ordinary citizens could taste Sichuan cuisine; Chen Songru and other veteran chefs taught younger cooks that “only by mastering à la carte dishes can one master banquet dishes.”

Recounts the founding history of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant (Zhou Enlai’s proposal, Zhu De’s insistence on “keeping the true Sichuan flavor,” Chen Yi as “half-manager,” etc.), and describes head chef Chen Songru entering Zhongnanhai three times to serve Chairman Mao and instructing 32 North Korean chefs in Sichuan cuisine.

A self-published account of the restaurant’s founding. The piece states at its head that its “content draws mainly on the memoir published in 1988 by the late Sichuan master and former head chef of the Sichuan Restaurant, Chen Songru” — that is, the Short History of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant already held here. Its facts are therefore largely a retelling of Chen Songru’s own account: useful as popular reading, not as an independent source.

An official district-government feature, unusually dense with detail, and it corroborates the position taken on this site: it states plainly that 4 August 1959 was “the trial dinner before the Sichuan Restaurant formally opened”, and records that manager Chu Tugen announced there and then that the opening would fall on 1 October — set this against the Ziyang accounts that treat 4 August as the opening. It also carries a trial-dinner menu different from the one in Songfeng Ruren (snacks: beef pastries, pearl dumplings, red-oil dumplings, dandan noodles; hot dishes: sizzling rice with three delicacies, camphor-tea duck, home-style sea cucumber with minced pork, yu-xiang prawns, chestnuts with yellow cabbage, three-yuan ox head, kung pao chicken, dry-braised rock carp, snowflake walnut purée, and steamed cabbage in supreme broth); both are recorded side by side. It further explains how Chen Yi came to be called the restaurant’s “half-manager”, his habit of scoring dishes (pineapple fermented rice 100, duck breast with soy dregs 98, dry-braised fish head 95), his reminder that “a waiter is half a cook”, Mao’s instruction to “net a live fish for the master chefs”, and the five home dishes always made for Zhu De’s birthday dinners.

From a series on Sichuan cooking beyond Sichuan, compiled from the oral accounts of Jiang Xueyun, Luo Songbai, Xiao Jianming, Hua Wentong and others. It tells how, at a central economic conference in the winter of 1958, Chen Yi and other Sichuan-born leaders remarked to Zhou Enlai that they had long gone without the food of home; Zhou proposed at once that Beijing and Sichuan jointly open a Sichuan restaurant, which was built in a little over five months and opened on 1 October 1959. It records the first manager Chu Tugen coming from Chongqing, Luo Guorong recommending Huang Shaoqing, and Chen Songru arriving from the Duoyi in Chengdu as convener and first head of the kitchen. There follows a detailed reconstruction of the four courtyards, an account of the Cultural Revolution years, and a life of the pastry cook Chen Zhenzhen. One caution: on Chen Songru as first head of the kitchen the author notes that a reader has objected and the point awaits verification; Part Two answers this at length. A self-published media article, for reference only.

The sequel sets out to clear up several things “often mentioned and easily confused”. Three bear directly on holdings recorded here. First, the menu of Sihanouk’s sixtieth-birthday banquet in 1982: the article sets Chen Songru’s own draft of November 1982 beside Xiao Jianming’s 1999 transcript and the version printed in Liu Zihua’s book, finding the first two closely matched and the third far off, and explaining that “red-braised ox head” and “braised ox-head squares”, “steamed yuanyu” and “steamed tuanyu”, are each one dish under two names. Second, it corrects the claim that the banquet was held in the Sanxibei: that room seats a single table, which cannot square with seven, and Chen Tinglong and Xiao Jianming confirm the third courtyard’s Great North Hall - agreeing with the handwritten menu held here, which reads “seven tables in the Great North Hall of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant”. Third, it corrects the attribution of the dan dan noodles to Chen Zhenzhen: she had by then moved to the snack counter, and the day’s snacks were made by Xue Honggui and Li Xiuju. A self-published media article, for reference only.

Held on 29 July 2023 at the Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Centre in Chengdu, under the guidance of the Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and hosted by the provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Centre together with the Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Committee of the Sichuan Historical Society. Chen Tinglong; Wang Gang, chairman of the Meizhou Dongpo group; Yang Xiaocheng, former deputy manager of the Chengdu Catering Company and head chef of Rongleyuan in New York; and Wang Kaifa, a provincial bearer of Sichuan culinary heritage, each spoke of the Chen Songru they had known. Three points are new to this site: the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook was commissioned from Chen Songru in the 1980s by the Sichuan Science and Technology Press; he assembled it from the four hundred–odd dishes he had been setting down year by year since the 1970s, adding some of the restaurant’s specialities; the first printing ran to just over nine thousand copies, of which he received fifty and the rest were given by the restaurant to relevant institutions rather than sold; and Yang Xiaocheng showed the copy Chen Songru inscribed for him in March 1990.

An official government source recounting the restaurant’s founding — proposed by Zhu De and Chen Yi, named by Zhou Enlai — and its recent revival of several lost classic Sichuan banquet dishes and compilation of historical banquet menus.

At the first Cross-Strait Healthy China Tourism & Food Culture Exchange Week, Chen Tinglong spoke as a state-banquet Sichuan cuisine master chef: recounting, at age 77, having trained under his father Chen Songru’s strict standards since 1969, later serving at the Swiss embassy, the Chinese Garden in Stuttgart, Germany, and teaching Sichuan culinary techniques in France, Italy, and Canada; a non-professional media source, for reference only.

A central-media reprint of a regional industry report which, surveying two millennia of Ziyang’s food lineage, places Chen Songru alongside Chang Hong, Wang Bao, Dong Jun and Lai Yuanxin as the modern “head of the Sichuan culinary house”. A single passing mention with no new material, but it shows where he sits in his hometown’s account of itself.

Published April 29, 2026. Traces the lineage of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant's "Oil-Net Lantern Chicken": in the Republican era, Chengdu restaurateur Che Yaoxian created "Lantern Chicken" at his eatery Nulican; the dish later spread to Chongqing's Huixianlou, which became popular when that restaurant opened a branch in Washington, D.C. in 1982. State-banquet master Chen Songru then adapted it — according to the article, in 1959 he combined the traditional "Oil-Net Purse Chicken" with "Lantern Chicken" to create "Oil-Net Lantern Chicken," using a "three-fold five-layer" caul-fat wrapping technique. Diverges somewhat from material already confirmed on this site: per Chen Tinglong's A Brief Account of State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine, this site records the dish as adapted solely from "Oil-Net Purse Chicken" (with no mention of combining it with a separate "Lantern Chicken"), using the "Beijing young chicken," prepared as "one dish, two colors, two flavors." The Che Yaoxian/Nulican/Huixianlou lineage and the "three-fold five-layer" technique are net-new information for this site, not yet independently verified. Self-published article; for reference only.

Published May 6, 2026, by Zeng Yundong. Recounts two accounts of the origin of Camphor-Tea Smoked Duck (one crediting late-Qing Chengdu chef Huang Jinglin with adapting an imperial smoked-duck recipe; the other tracing it to folk smoked-duck traditions around Leshan and Mount Emei, formally named in 1890), and a diplomatic anecdote said to have been told firsthand by state-banquet master Chen Songru: during the 1954 Geneva Conference, Zhou Enlai reportedly served Camphor-Tea Smoked Duck to Charlie Chaplin at a banquet, and Chaplin, praising it as "a rare delicacy in this world," asked to take a portion home; the piece also notes that Zhou served the dish to a Laotian prince in 1961. This site's existing material contains no independent source corroborating this anecdote. Self-published article; for reference only.

Published June 21, 2026, source China News Service Sichuan (an official China News Service outlet; editor: Zhu Huan) Independent source. Reports a thank-you symposium held in Chengdu for the experts who collated the "Rare Documents Collection of Chinese Sichuan Cuisine" (59 rare documents, 45 volumes in 51 books). Chen Tinglong is named among the veteran master chefs who took part in the long-term collation and interpretation work. Corroborates material already on this site: the article's line that, alongside this collection's publication, "important editing projects such as the Languangjian manuscript and the Chen Songru manuscript have also been completed and will soon be formally published" appears to describe the same project as this site's July 2026 acquisition of Authentic Mastery of Chinese Sichuan Cuisine Grandmasters: Chen Songru (Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, edited by Li Zuomin from Chen Songru's manuscripts) — this report is effectively background coverage published about a month before that book's formal release, an independent official source confirming the editing and publishing project genuinely existed rather than resting on a single unverified claim.

An official district source, the sixth piece in the series “Xicheng’s Time-Honoured Restaurants.” It recounts the founding of 1959 — Zhou Enlai chose the site, named the house and approved its establishment, and Guo Moruo wrote the signboard — and notes that the chefs gathered at its opening “included the doyen of Chinese Sichuan cuisine, Master Chen Songru.” It also sets out a full line of succession: “from the first head chef, the national-treasure master Chen Songru, to Zheng Shaowu and Yu Jianmin, and on to the present brand executive chef Fu Lisheng.” It dates Deng Xiaoping’s “the taste of home is too good” to November 1983, and the Korean chefs’ study of home-style sea cucumber to 1956, against 1982 and 1962 as recorded elsewhere on this site; both are set down as they stand. A duplicate is also kept at the WeChat account "Quanjude Group" reprint: since the same article has been republished by more than one host, the trail survives even if one of them takes it down.

A food-blog piece surveying the difference between the Sichuan and Chongqing styles of fish-fragrant shredded pork, citing as an example the illustrated fish-fragrant pork recipe in Chen Songru's 1991 book Authentic Sichuan Cuisine, 160 Dishes: the book's method calls for cooking wine and reconstituted dried bamboo shoots, both largely absent from today's common recipes — the fermented pungency of pickled chillies now suffices to mask any rawness in the meat, so the cooking wine has gradually fallen away, while fresh bamboo shoots, kohlrabi and other seasonal vegetables are now readily available, making the reconstituted dried shoots unnecessary. Through the evolution of one specific dish's preparation, the piece corroborates the authenticity of the book's historical content and traces how Sichuan cooking technique has shifted over time.

Published in 2026, exact date not given, a food-and-story piece from a self-media account. Describes "pocket tofu" — a clear-soup skill dish made by frying, cold-rinsing and slow-braising firm tofu into a hollow "pocket" filled with broth — recorded here as one of Master Chen Songru's specialities while he headed the kitchen at Chengdu's Furong Restaurant, relying on natural flavour rather than heat and spice. Consistent with material already confirmed on this site: the Life page's timeline already records him cooking at the Furong Restaurant, the Red Flag training class and the Jinniuba guesthouse in 1969, matching the setting described here. This dish has not previously been catalogued on this site — a net addition. The article cites Chengdu Sichuan Cuisine Gazetteer and Biographical Records of Sichuan's Famous Chefs · Chen Songru as its own references, not independently verified by this site. A self-media article; for reference only.

On July 25, 2019, Chen Tinglong donated 21 items — Chen Songru’s manuscripts and personal effects — to the Ziyang Municipal Party Committee, predating the 2024 donation event. A backup copy is kept at the Ziyang Daily's same-day report, by reporters Hu Jiayin and Xiao Tanlin, which states Chen Tinglong's trip was to attend "the press conference of the Second World Sichuan Cuisine Conference."

Held in Ziyang on 7 July 2022. The Chen Songru State-Banquet Sichuan Culture and Technique Committee of the Sichuan Provincial Food Culture Research Society was declared founded, with Chen Tinglong as founder and chairman, Feng Ji as vice-chairman and secretary-general, and Song Xingtong as executive vice-chairman. It was also stated that Chen Songru’s state-banquet Sichuan culture and technique had been entered on the intangible cultural heritage list of Yanjiang District, Ziyang, and that this is the only committee in the Sichuan culinary world approved under an individual’s name. Note: this body is not the same as the “Chen Songru Expert Committee” (28 April 2022) recorded elsewhere on this site — founding date, supervising body and name all differ. A forum source; beyond the fact of the founding, its language is largely promotional and is not taken as historical record.

On 22 February 2024, the Ziyang Municipal People's Government announced its sixth batch of municipal-level intangible cultural heritage representative items, 15 in total. "Chen Songru's Sichuan Culinary Craft" was listed under Traditional Craft — following the "Chen Songru State-Banquet Sichuan Culture and Technique Committee" (7 July 2022) and the "Chen Songru Expert Committee" (28 April 2022), this is the third and now first officially recognized intangible-heritage designation this site records; the three differ in institutional nature and the body granting them, and are not substitutes for one another. A backup copy of a condensed retelling is kept at Ziyang Culture and Tourism's Yanjiang District intangible-heritage feature (December 2024), which includes a 4:14 video.

On April 23, 2024, Chen Tinglong donated Chen Songru’s working manuscripts and precious historical materials from the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant to the Sichuan Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center and the Sichuan History Society’s Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Committee.

Another authoritative media report on the same donation event, noting the more than 500 dishes Chen Songru compiled and works such as 160 Authentic Sichuan Recipes and Beijing Sichuan Restaurant Menu; the event also honored ten representative inheritors of traditional Sichuan culinary techniques.

Reports on a heritage-transmission event at the Sichuan Restaurant, in which second-generation successor Yu Jianmin presented the Sichuan Restaurant’s Old Recipe Book to a new generation of chefs, reflecting the brand’s continued legacy today.

Recounts how, during a 1958 central work conference, Zhou Enlai proposed founding the Sichuan Restaurant after Sichuan-native attendees expressed homesickness for their cuisine, and how Chen Songru served as head chef from the restaurant’s founding, repeatedly entering Zhongnanhai to cook dishes such as oil-net lantern chicken for Chairman Mao; a non-professional media source, for reference only.

Recounts the founding of the Sichuan Restaurant on October 1, 1959 (decided and named by Premier Zhou, with a plaque inscribed by Guo Moruo), and Chen Songru’s career as head chef overseeing numerous major state banquets before later receiving the honor of Asian World Master Chef.

Recounts the historical origins and representative dishes of Sichuan cuisine featured on state banquet menus; a non-professional media source, for reference only.

An interview with Ma Xulun, Deputy General Manager of Quanjude Group and General Manager of the Sichuan Restaurant, recounting how Chen Songru, as the restaurant’s first-generation head chef, compiled the Sichuan Restaurant Recipe Book and earned the high regard of leaders such as Zhu De and Chen Yi, and discussing the restaurant’s current direction of combining tradition with innovation.